Press
Online Press Kit
- One-sheet bio/description PDF
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What people say about Sky Pilots:
West Coast Peformer Magazine
The West Coast could use a few more bands like Sky Pilots. The San Francisco-based trio of drummer Bill French, bassist/vocalist Mike Chopko and guitarist/vocalist Patrick Wachter plies a heavily experimental sound from the far reaches of indie rock. Throughout their sophomore album, Enjoy a Day Off, Sky Pilots mash together mildly melodic lyrical passages and jerky instrumental tangents. Pulling together these would-be disparate elements into a loosely cohesive whole, the band transcends its ingredients and yields continually surprising results.
“Elk,” for example, puddle-jumps through a slew of time signatures, forming a musical bed that ideally suits the two vocalists’ vastly different rhythms, registers and timbres. Three songs in, “Shoot the Pass” opens with a wandering, two-minute bed of guitar harmonics and percussive flailing that gives way to a rare, breezy rhythm and the album’s first vocal harmonies. Never at rest, the song’s driving instrumental bridge unravels in waves of decreasing tension before skidding down the runway toward the finale crash landing.
On paper, the continual abutting of such jagged sections sounds repetitive, but the sheer depth of Sky Pilots’ bag of compositional attacks renders repetition nearly impossible. Enjoy a Day Off does make for a challenging listen. Its stop-and-go aesthetic amounts to a far cry from what most would call a vacation and in all but the most hardened fans of sonic whiplash, repeated listens will yield a numbing need for something more mercifully melodic. But whatever the album lacks in the way of pleasantries, it more than makes up for in suggesting a pretension-free band well on its way to something of a creative zenith. (Ghost Mansion)
The Bay Bridged
“The most recent addition to the Thread family, Sky Pilots would have fit perfectly in the middle of the mid-90s Midwest indie-rock scene, where Fugazi’s post-hardcore influences coming from the East meet Sunny Day Real Estate’s atmospheric, vaguely proggy-emo sound coming from the West. Like bands such as Braid, Shiner, Bluetip, Jejune, and Giants Chair, Sky Pilots combine muscular rhythm sections with angular guitar chime for a sound that’s at once aggressive and expansive. They even use Braid’s dual-vocalist tactic to highlight the different sides of the band’s personality (bassist Mike Chopko is the “sensitive crooner”; guitarist Patrick Watchter is the “yeller”). If they had been around ten years ago, Sky Pilots would have been in danger of getting lost in the shuffle; in present-day San Francisco, however, they stand out as fresh and energetic, and maybe even smartly poised to spearhead a revival.”
